The term “architecture” has been used to refer to various types of overviews that provide guidance to software systems and applications developers. Since the mid-1990s, the term “architecture” has been used by business managers, especially those involved in enterprise planning and in business process re-engineering projects, to describe an overview of a business. For example, some managers refer to a high-level description of all core business processes in an organization as a “business process architecture”.
Today, there is a growing movement among both business managers and information technology (“IT”) managers to use the term “enterprise architecture” to refer to a comprehensive description of all key elements and relationships that make up an organization. Increasingly, when professionals talk about the alignment of business processes and goals with IT applications and middleware systems, they rely on an enterprise architecture to define how this business/IT alignment should be achieved.